Annual report 2021:
Number of projects: 21
Number of countries: 9
Number of sponsored children January 2021: 555
Number of sponsored children December 2021: 520
Number of children not yet sponsored December 2021: 109
2021, a year in which we were still dealing with corona and the associated challenges. Project Held belonged to a church society from which a lot of fame came. Project Held was regularly brought to the attention during the Sunday services and during the events we had a booth there. In April 2021 this came to an end because the church ceased to exist and we became our own foundation, Stichting Project Held.
January – April 2021, the costs within our projects and to keep Project Held running continue, but we see a stagnation in the growth of sponsors. There has been a pandemic in the world since March 2020 and we cannot deny that this affects us. The costs go up and the number of sponsors decreases.
Because no more church meetings were held due to corona, only online meetings could be followed. In addition, no more events were organized. As a result, we noticed that both sponsorship and the planned growth stagnated. Of course it is understandable that some of our sponsors were hit. Some lost their income and there was a lot of uncertainty. It remains uncertain whether growth will take place in the near future, sponsors have become somewhat reluctant and some have even had to cancel their sponsorship because they could no longer manage financially.
On the other hand, you hear the extra need at our children's homes. Due to the pandemic, food quickly became more expensive and the older children came back to sit at home while they normally attended the boarding school, which again entailed additional costs. School fees have been paid for the whole year, but despite that the children were back at home and all those extra mouths had to be fed, which presented the necessary challenge.
So they also experience the necessary challenges at our children's homes. Little food, high food prices and some of the children had to move to another place, because not many children were allowed to be in the same place because of Corona. This caused extra costs in terms of transport, rent, etc. In addition, fear also played a role, fear of getting Corona, passing it on or even closing the children's home. Suddenly nothing was obvious anymore.
The children's homes knocked on our door for help, while sponsorship declined and there was no prospect of growth. When in April we heard the news that the church would stop on June 1 and we would no longer fall under the municipality, we had to make the choice to become an independent foundation. Something that was difficult for us at first.
Of course we couldn't leave the children and projects to their own devices. We switched quickly and started realizing the independent foundation, Stichting Project Held, as soon as possible. In the end, this went well and on July 1, 2021 we were an existing foundation at the Chamber of Commerce. A special moment!
From September 1, Project Held has its own bank account and from January 2022 we can also collect from that bank account. We are grateful, happy and incredibly proud of the fact that thanks to Him it all went reasonably quickly and smoothly and our projects and sponsors have hardly been hindered by this.
Still, the challenge of Covid-19 is there. Food and fuel are becoming more expensive and now that the children can go back to school, the extra costs for fuel come into play again. But the costs for school clothes, teaching materials and writing utensils have also increased.
Finding sponsors has become a bit more difficult. As mentioned before, we no longer have large events where we could stand with a booth and life for the people here has also become much more expensive, so support is no longer always possible. We still work with posting on social media where we get new sponsors every now and then.
For us, as an independent foundation, it is a challenge to reach the right people in the right way.
In consultation with the board and stakeholders, we did a DNA session and direction session, which gave us more insight into the course we want to follow and how we can help our projects in an effective way.
From the sessions we can conclude that with the current team (board, 2 employees and a number of active stakeholders), in addition to helping the children through child sponsorship, we also want to help the projects more in their needs, challenges and self-sufficiency in various areas. We want to help the projects more broadly. We have therefore asked a number of our projects what their dreams would be if money were not an issue. Well we knew that! The projects have vision, dreams and hopes to help even more children and support the local population and meet the needs that exist. Wonderful to hear all these dreams, we believe that nothing is impossible with God.
Of course we cannot help all projects at the same time and not at once, but we will do our best to see how we can realize this together with the projects. We will focus on this in the near future.
In short, this means for the coming period that we will make an overview of the goals, vision and dreams of our projects and start somewhere with taking the first steps to help realize this. Together with a marketing expert, we will see if we can do more with companies here in the Netherlands, so that money will come in for the realization of the dreams and goals of the various projects.
2022 will be a year of development! We will collaborate more with other organizations to learn from each other and to grow.
Our vision is to build a bridge between poverty and self-reliance, so that people will ultimately be and become less dependent on third parties.
We are looking forward to the new year with great anticipation! What could be better than working together and joining forces to have a greater impact on the world around us.
See here the ANBI publication.